Game Attendance. Beautiful Day for Game

[WestCoastWildcat]

Also, everyone is likely to be struggling with attendance issues like this post-Covid. And over next few years likely more people will transition to just watching games on TV.

Everyone is going to have attendance issues, especially smaller privates like ours.

It's why considering shrinking the stadium in the renovation makes sense. Make it an absolute top of the line experience for 40-42k.

I also agree shrinking the stadium makes sense. San Diego State is building a new downsized stadium (~35k) compared to the 50+k of the old now demolished Qualcomm stadium. The new stadium could be expanded in the future in the off chance if a pro team were to appear. But that seems unlikely. SDSU rarely filled the Q for home games anyway. One counter to a smaller stadium for us is that when other Big Ten teams come in esp OSU and UM and others the stadium does fill up with fans from the opposing teams. Don’t know what it would take to attract more non-alum Chicago fans to games. A new or newly renovated stadium might help.

 

[willycat]

There's just not much we can do, I mean the team has had about as much success as is historically reasonable (compare that to Illinois for example).

I think rebuilding the stadium will help give us a chance to really attract new people, but there's really just not much that can be done except to keep winning, spend on a big stadium renovation, and keep trying to build the brand locally/nationally.

It's just hard for an elite private school to appeal to locals when most of its students come from outside the state and alums leave the state upon graduation.

If we'd had this kind of success in the 70s-80s, would have been able to build something more permanent. Now? It's near impossible given the million things people have to do/teams to support locally/etc.

Stadium renovation and what we can do to really try to bring people in after that is basically where rubber meets the road.

Serve booze!

 

[phatcat]

Don't feel like looking it up, but we have reasonable attendance compared to others that aren't behemoths. The problem, to me, isn't the size of the stadium, it's that a huge share of the crowd is, and always will be, visiting fans from said behemoths. There are just too many other school alums/fans in Chicago, we are arguably the best destination in the B1G, we are centrally located in the conference with a huge airport nearby. Now, we could make the stadium a lot smaller like some have said, but I don't imagine we want to give up, say, $5M a year in visiting fan revenue.

Edit: even if we shrink the stadium, the OSU fans of the world will just start paying our ST holders like 500 bucks a ticket, and we will just have a smaller crowd still dominated by unfriendlies.

 

[GOUNUII]

Myself and many others from Evanston, Wilmette, Etc, area have been die hard fans since young and still prefer NU sports over our college's teams. Guess were a unique crew

NU football in many ways is like a Broadway play with great technical merit but no star power or compelling sensory experiences. The critics and die hard theatre types appreciate it’s technical merit, but attendance still suffers without the star factor and sensory experiences necessary to provide much entertainment value.

GOUNUII

 

[Fighter of the Nightman]

On the other hand, who wants to go to Champaign?

You guys might be a bit biased; Champaign regularly gets ranked as one of the best college towns in the country. It is what it is - a small, Midwestern college (only) town that gives that old school campus feel. It isn’t competing with a suburb like Evanston or a capital city like Madison, WI, after all.

Anyway, as a (non-grad) Illini fan living in the Gold Coast, I actually think NU has improved immeasurably over the last two decades or so at attracting more casual fans. It’s always going to be hard as an elite private school with alumni from all over in a metro area with literally hundreds of thousands of transplants, but progress has been made. When my dad was my age, there literally was no such thing as a non-grad NU fan in Chicago, but you do see some now a days. Not as many as Illinois or Notre Dame (who have “local/state” and Irish/Catholic draws NU simply won’t ever have), but WAY more than in the past. I think this is even more the case in some North Shore suburbs than in the north side of the city, too.

As for what could be done to make it better? I suppose more instate alumni to put more “pressure” on unaffiliated locals, but I doubt the university leadership would really go for that type of initiative. A “Duke basketball” attitude toward athlete admissions, too. A lot easier for a non-college Chicagoan to root for Ayo starting on an Illini team, for example.